Drupal APIs

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started working on understanding Drupal theming.

My first goal was to change the presentation used for downloading attachments on both this site and on another that I maintain. Each site required different changes, and in fact runs a different Drupal version (sigh!).

I’m going to blog later on how the process evolved, but some initial observations are worth making.

Documentation - Drupal suffers from the inverse problem to most open source efforts … rather than too little documentation that leaves potential developers stumbling around in the dark, it seems at times that Drupal has too much documentation, with a simple Google search bringing a deluge of results. Let me hasten to say that I’m not really complaining - I like having too much documentation - it’s far preferable to the reverse.

API Design - it’s clear from my initial steps that a goodly amount of skull sweat went into the design of the Drupal APIs, including the ones relating to theming. Even though there’s clearly some deep PHP voodoo occuring within hidden depths, the levels that I had to deal with were clear, and (more importantly) worked as documented. Great stuff - I wish more projects were this easy to get started upon!

More to follow …